Social media outlets along with tech giants have started efforts of knocking-out accounts of Russian media. Meanwhile, Google AdSense, which is one of the significant income sources of the newspapers has sent a notice titled ‘Important Notice: Update regarding Ukraine’, where it said:
Dear Publisher,
Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.
Please note, we have already been enforcing on claims related to the war in Ukraine when they violated existing policies (for instance, the Dangerous or Derogatory content policy prohibits monetizing content that incites violence or denies tragic events). This update is meant to clarify, and in some cases expand, our publisher guidance as it relates to this conflict.
This pause includes, but not limited to, claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizen.
Meanwhile, leading social media platforms such as Twitter have started knocking-out accounts of Russian media outlets such as RT, TASS, Ria Novosti etcetera. Instead, dozens of fake accounts of the Russian media outlets are being created on social media platforms, wherefrom anti-Russia contents are being distributed.
Commenting on the ongoing censorship on Russian media outlets, Sohail Choudhury, Executive Editor of Blitz said, “In this age of advanced technology, when hundreds of millions of people are dependent on social media platforms for information, Russia clearly is losing the ‘soft war’ and gradually getting cornered. Taking this situation, pro-Ukraine contents will continue dominating both social media and major search engines, thus leaving a very negative impression about the policymakers in Kremlin, including President Vladimir Putin, Russia and even Russian military. As a conscious individual I or those in this newspaper [BLiTZ] do not support war anywhere in the world. We are absolutely against murder of innocent civilians and ordeals of the people. We definitely want immediate end of the war in Ukraine and peace in that part of the world. At the same time, we hope, major search engines and social media platforms would at least allow Russian media outlets as well as any content critical of Ukraine or neo-Nazi Azov battalion get the opportunity of getting published. In this case, social media platforms may add a statement, as they did to anything related to COVID”.
Mr. Choudhury further said, “Banning or knocking-out media outlets from social media clearly goes against the global theme of flee flow of information or freedom of expression. Russian media outlets also have the right to continue their existence on social media platforms”.
Commenting on AdSense, Sohail Choudhury said: “Due to the latest decision of AdSense, which feeds advertisement to hundreds of thousands of media outlets throughout the world, newspaper publishers will endure financial loss, which in some cases, may even leave adverse effect on newspapers”.
Commenting on the contents related to Ukraine war, the Washington Post in a report said:
A month ago, praising a neo-Nazi militia or calling for violence against Russians could get you suspended from Facebook in Ukraine. Now, both are allowed in the context of the war between the two countries. Meanwhile, Russian state media organizations that once posted freely are blocked in Europe on the platform.
It isn’t just Facebook that’s rewriting its rules in response to Russia’s bloody, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. From Google barring ads in Russia and taking down YouTube videos that trivialize the war, to Twitter refusing to recommend tweets that link to Russian state media and TikTok suspending all video uploads from the country in response to its “fake news” law — each of the largest social media platforms has taken ad hoc actions in recent weeks that go beyond or contradict its previous policies.
The moves illustrate how Internet platforms have been scrambling to adapt content policies built around notions of political neutrality to a wartime context. And they suggest that those rule books — the ones that govern who can say what online — need a new chapter on geopolitical conflicts.
“The companies are building precedent as they go along,” says Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech policy consulting firm Anchor Change and a former public policy director at Facebook. “Part of my concern is that we’re all thinking about the short term” in Ukraine, she says, rather than the underlying principles that should guide how platforms approach wars around the world.
Moving fast in response to a crisis isn’t a bad thing in itself. For tech companies that have become de facto stewards of online information, reacting quickly to global events, and changing the rules where necessary, is essential. On the whole, social media giants have shown an unusual willingness to take a stand against the invasion, prioritizing their responsibilities to Ukrainian users and their ties to democratic governments over their desire to remain neutral, even at the cost of being banned from Russia.
The problem is that they’re grafting their responses to the war onto the same global, one-size-fits-all frameworks that they use to moderate content in peacetime, says Emerson T. Brooking, a senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. And their often opaque decision-making processes leave their policies vulnerable to misinterpretation and questions of legitimacy.
The big tech companies now have playbooks for terrorist attacks, elections, and pandemics — but not wars.
What platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok need, Brooking argues, are not another hard-and-fast set of rules that can be generalized to every conflict, but a process and protocols for wartime that can be applied flexibly and contextually when fighting breaks out — loosely analogous to the commitments tech companies made to address terror content after the 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. Facebook and other platforms have also developed special protocols over the years for elections, from “war rooms” that monitor for foreign interference or disinformation campaigns to policies specifically prohibiting misinformation about how to vote, as well as for the covid-19 pandemic.
The war in Ukraine should be the impetus for them to think in the same systematic way about the sort of “break glass” policy measures that may be needed specifically in cases of wars, uprisings, or sectarian fighting, says Harbath of Anchor Change — and about what the criteria would be for applying them, not only in Ukraine but in conflicts around the world, including those that command less public and media attention.
Facebook, for its part, has at least started along this path. The company says it began forming dedicated teams in 2018 to “better understand and address the way social media is used in countries experiencing conflict,” and that it has been hiring more people with local and subject-area expertise in Myanmar and Ethiopia. Still, its actions in Ukraine — which had struggled to focus Facebook’s attention on Russian disinformation as early as 2015 — show it has more work to do…
